Monday, July 31, 2006
Dumbest Criminal Ever
This story goes from amusing coincidence to head-scratching dumb in a blink.
A waitress who asked a woman to show proof of age upon ordering a drink was shown her own license, police said.
The waitress, a 22-year-old Lakewood woman, had reported her wallet stolen from a bar on July 9. Her driver's license and credit card were in the wallet. The credit card had already been used for $1,000 in illicit purchases, authorities said.
Last week, the waitress was working at the Moosehead Saloon when the stolen license was produced, officers said.
So the waitress went to call the cops, but she didn't do it smoothly and the woman with her ID took off. She apparently had friends at the bar though, and they ratted her out and police arrested her at her home. The best part? She's 23.
If you can explain why a 23 year old woman is using the stolen ID of a 22 year old woman to get into a bar with an age requirement of 21, you're a step ahead of me. What 23 year old doesn't have some sort of valid ID? The only thing I can think is that she intended to use the stolen credit card to pay for her drinks, but how could the credit card still be good, if it was stolen last week and already had $1000 charged on it? The waitress must have cancelled it by now, unless she's even dumber than the thief?
Labels: criminals, drinking
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Words and our inevitable decline
A few random observations.
My new favorite description is to tie two things together, modifying the same object. I.E. that is both burnt and inedible. That's not a very good example though, since it's sort of redundant. One I've been using verbally of late is "fat and misshapen," usually when describing the posterior of a supersized American, as seen on the Jerry Springer show.
Today I stopped by Trader Joe's on my way to Baja Fresh for dinner, and was horrified by the sight of an aging, beachbum, body-builder. He was about 55-60, tall, broad of shouder, graying, and generally in tremendous shape for a man his age. Hell, for a man of any age, in this day and age of ever-softening waistlines. I figured he used to be very muscular, and with exercise he was holding onto enough of it to still look pretty strapping. The problem was his brief tank top, and the obvious fact that he did most of his weight lifting in the sunlight.
With a less-revealing shirt he would merely have been kind of wrinkly and over-browned. As it was, I found him both leathery, and cancerous. I actually turned left at the entrance, heading through the dry goods first, just to avoid having to walk behind him as I picked up mushrooms, celery, and red peppers while he wound his way through the produce.
Speaking of Baja Fresh, as I was several paragraphs past, my receipt had a 1-800 number and a website to visit, and said if I completed a quick survey at either, I'd get a free sport mug (or something like that) on my next visit. I didn't want one enough to be bothered, but I amused myself imagining my responses to their hypothetical questions.
Why do you visit our restaurant?
Because the nearest Rubio's is way the hell in Oakland.
What could we do to improve your dining experience?
Quit charging $.40 more per fish taco than Rubio's does, especially considering theirs are both larger and more succulent.
See how I dropped in the "adjective and adjective" there? Try it yourself, but be careful, it's kind of an advanced technique.
In other odd English usages, here are three examples I've had on my notes page for like, months.
We go home. We do not go to home, or go to a home.
We go to work.We do not go work, or go to a work.
We go to the park, not go to park, or go park.
How does that make any sense? Some of the 2nd and 3rd styles make sense, as a verb or other usage, but not always, and in any event, it's completely arbitrary as to which are correct and which are not. You just have to know, and if you're fluent in the language one way just "sounds right."
This sort of thing is what keeps me from trying to learn another language, much though I'd like to know several. I'm sure English is as or more screwy than most of the others, but these sorts of arbitrary rules that can't be logic'ed out would drive me crazy. Besides simply memorizing thousands of words, there are all the irregular forms of verbs, words that change form and meaning by context, and so on. I don't like computer languages, since I don't like having to be precise and exact like that, but at least they're logical and intelligently-designed. A <strong> always means <strong>; it doesn't change if it's in the same sentence with a <blockquote> or a <font>.
That being said, I had to use special symbols to represent the <, ("& l t ;" does it, without the spaces, without triggering as HTML and confusing the blogger script), and if you follow XHTML standards you're not supposed to use <b> or <blockquote> or <i> or other old terms anymore; you're supposed to insert code like "<span class=indentstyle2>" and use PHP or other modern languages to carry out basic text modifying commands. Which perfectly illustrates the trouble with letting humans modify things.
Labels: language
St. Mel's True Colors?
In the latest celebrity arrested news,
word comes that Mel Gibson was busted for a DUI late Thursday night.
Gibson's 2006 Lexus LS 430 was speeding on Pacific Coast Highway when deputies stopped him at 2:36 a.m., said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
"He was going 87 miles per hour in a 45-miles-per-hour zone," Whitmore said.
Deputies conducted field sobriety tests. A breath test indicated Gibson's blood-alcohol level was 0.12 percent, Whitmore said. California drivers 21 and older must remain under 0.08 percent.
Not a big deal; sure Mel's famous, and while promoting The Passion he repeatedly said his religion had helped him beat his past demons, but it's not a major DUI. He was driving pretty wildly, but he was only a beer over the limit and he didn't hit anyone.
So what's the news, then?
The report says Gibson told the deputy, "You motherfucker. I'm going to fuck you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."
The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "Fucking Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"
The deputy became alarmed as Gibson's tirade escalated, and called ahead for a sergeant to meet them when they arrived at the station. When they arrived, a sergeant began videotaping Gibson, who noticed the camera and then said, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?"
Well alright then. Even better, the LA Sheriff's Office is in trouble, since this was all in the arresting officer's original report, before higher ups told him to
lose the stuff that made Mel look bad.
Unlike fellow religious nut/actor Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson didn't replace his professionl publicist with his fellow nut sister, as evidenced by
the apology issued the next day; an apology that Mel might have written as much as two or three words of.
Gibson also apologized Saturday for what he called "my belligerent behavior" when he was taken into custody.
"The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person," he said. "I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry. I have battled with the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse."
Neither Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob, nor the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department would comment on what Gibson said when he was arrested early Friday on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Sheriff's Sgt. Rich Erickson declined to respond, saying the case was still under investigation.
They're trying to keep it out of the media, but it's too late, and other mainstream (not just blog) articles have detailed Mel's ravings. (With mentions about his
famously anti-semitic and a holocaust denying daddy.) Nothing Mel said surprises me. No, I didn't expect him to get busted for a DUI and start ranting, but I'm not surprised by what he said under the circumstances. I'm not letting him blame it on the booze either -- he blew a .12, which is 50% over the legal limit in California, but for an alcoholic, as Mel admits to being, that's hardly even tipsy.
Besides, he was drunk, not on LSD or something mind-altering. Booze loosens your lips and lowers your inhibitions; it doesn't make you say things completely different from what you actually believe. Well, it might make you say, "I love you." when that's not entirely true, but so does lust, and that's still legal (if not entirely safe) to drive while under the influence of.
Labels: bigotry, drinking, mel gibson
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Weather based dietary choices.
After bitching about the weather so much, I feel compelled to mention that it's been lovely the past two days. We haven't needed to run the A/C at all, today's high was about 78, and while it's still slightly warmer than average, and a lot more humid than usual, it's not bad at all. We've slept in the bedroom the past two nights, and didn't even bother with the usual "box fan blowing out the kitchen window to suck cool air into the bedroom" trick last night.
They're even forecasting more of the same for the next few days, which means one thing... we've got too much fruit lying around the house.
When it's hot, as it was for the past three weeks, I tend not to eat very much during the day, and to want cool, juicy things when I do eat. Fruit (and vegetables, to a less succulent extent) fit that bill nicely, and during the few hellish days that ultimately drove us to spend the best $349 ever, I ate something like 10 apples, 8 oranges, 3 pears, 2 pineapples, 1 cantaloupe, a small village of grapes, some plums, and more. Basically all the fruit we had handy, and lots more bought out of need, mid-heat wave.
Now that it's cooled down, I struggled to finish off the overripe pineapple and 5 pounds of grapes we had from last weekend, but the oranges, apples, nectarines, apricots and the rest of their brethren are lying around the kitchen and staring at me like the last puppy in a pet store window. I should eat them; they're good for me and they're not going to last forever and I like fruit... I just feel a bit lemur'ed out, at times, and want to move my dinner up the evolutionary ladder a bit.
As for Malaya, she kind of reminds me of my mother (kiss of death?) in this (and only this) case. They don't have much in common, but they're both very ambivalent towards fruit. Sometimes Malaya will tear into a bowl of strawberries or grapes, or she'll eat an orange every day, but other times it's all I can do to get her to take a bite of my platter of sliced apples, pears, and bananas. Her fruit desires are governed by some unpredictable internal mechanism, one that's synched to something, but nothing as simple as my own "hot = eat cold fruit" process.
The other problem when it's hot is that I get really lazy about food prep. No one wants to stand in the kitchen, sweating over a hot stove, as they say. I'll happily spend an hour cutting ingredients, stir frying, steaming, baking, etc for a single meal, when it's cool. When it's hot? Fuck that, let's just hit up Jack's for a spicy chicken sandwich combo, or throw in a pizza and go sit in front of the fan while it bakes. Fortunately, the excessive fruit consumption probably balances out the quick-and-easy junk food, nutrition-wise. That's what I tell myself, at least.
Labels: food, weather
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
More Videos and Comments
You guys seemed to enjoy this the last time I posted it, so
here's another page with a ton of links to youtube music videos. These aren't just 80s either; there are older ones and lots of newer ones, and they've got multiple videos by some artists.
There are two problems with the page; lots of the links are dead, since YouTube files are constantly being posted and removed (Ignore or laugh at their "try again in a few minutes." error message -- if a link doesn't work when you try it it's never going to.) and they've got the page set to play the videos in a box that cuts off the bottom with the time and slider bar, so you can't tell how long a file is, can't fast forward, can't rewind, and can't pause.
Happily, you can find virtually any video on YouTube that you know the name of, so if you see something on this list that's not working properly, just go to YouTube.com and search for it. Lately I've been going down wikipedia pages of bands I liked back in the day, looking at the discography for all their hits, and then searching for them on youtube. More often than not I find the video, several live versions, and the requisite "some guy playing his guitar on his webcam" version just for icing on the cake.
Incidentally, there's been a fair amount of spam comments lately, so I've enabled the moderation option. Your comments won't appear as soon as you make them anymore; only after I get an email and click okay, so you don't need to hit repost. I'm not going to turn nanny either; say anything you would normally have said in comments and I'll almost certainly okay it as soon as I check my email -- just as long as you're not spamming links to your Russian online gambling service, that is.
Labels: music, you tube
Sunday, July 23, 2006
The best $349 we'll ever spend.
As hinted last time out, Malaya and me gave in to the record heat wave, now stretching towards its third week, and got an air conditioner. We wanted
a portable one; they run about $400 and manage about 9000 BTU, which is enough to cool a small apartment. We figured we could use it in the living room during the day and move it into the bedroom at night, ensuring our sleeping comfort. Well, sleeping tolerance, at least.
Unfortunately, we came to that decision after more than a week of very high temperatures, and by that time there weren't any to be had. I spent a couple of hours Friday calling just about every Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe's, Sears, etc in the area, trying to find some portable A/C units, without success. Everyone was sold out, if they carried them in the first place (window models seem far more common), and no one had any idea when more might arrive.
I called some more Saturday morning, since a couple of WalMart's had said they might get some in Friday night, but when that went for naught, we headed out to a Kali workshop, planning to pick up a window A/C model on the way home. Friday had been hell, high just over 100, and humid so the heat lasted. We were sitting in the living room at 1am, with fans gusting, and sweating since it was still 87 outside. I've never seen weather anything like this in my 3 years in NoCal, and everyone else seems pretty shellshocked by it too.
Saturday and Sunday were forecast to be more of the same, and with the weather supposedly "cooling" (as the weather dudes on the local news said) to a still freakishly-high 88 by the middle of the week, we just couldn't wait any longer. So we left the BBQ/picnic after Kali a bit early, and hit several stores in a huge shopping center down in Union City. They've got a Target, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, and lots more spread out over a mile or so of mercilessly-hot parking lots, and while Wal-Mart was completely sold out of every type of a/c, Lowe's had a stack of heavy duty, 18,000 BTU window coolers. They were big ass things though, 110 pounds in the box, so we went on and checked the other stores just to see what variety we might find.
Home Depot had a few of about the same size, but unfortunately their plugs were 220v/20amp, or something like that. Not ones you can plug into a normal socket, and since they require a heavier line, like the kind that you plug washer/driers into, we would have had to get a new faceplate and a new amp for the fuse box, and I would have had to do some wiring. Malaya was not happy with that option, so we headed back to Lowe's, where we'd foolishly not marked the plug type.
We got lucky there; they still had a bunch of the giant a/c units (surrounded by sweaty, milling white people asking, "do you have anything smaller?") and better yet, while they were 208-230 volts, (or something like that) and had plugs that would fit our wall outlet. The outlet beside the little cabinet at the rear of the living room that we've had a kitty door cut into for 3 years, and two litter boxes inside of. Luckier was my foresight in crawling back there a couple of days ago, and seeing the plug and remembering what it was shaped like. (Two narrow sideways bars over the round grounding plug.)
- -
OAbout like that, as my expert ASCII art illustrates.
We weren't sure about the model, and it was a towering 18,000 BTU, more than double what we'd been thinking about buying, but these were almost literally the only air conditioners within 100 miles, and it was absolutely broiling outside, so we said what the hell, and made the purchase.
The first hard part was putting it in the car. I can carry more than 100 pounds without much trouble; I pick up Malaya all the time and I do lifts with 40 pound dumbbells in each hand at the gym and I've carried in more than that much weight after CostCo trips (50 pounds of rice, 30 pounds of catfood, with a 36 pack of Pepsi on top). The problem with the AC is that it's big; the box was about 2.5 x 2.5 x 1.5 feet, with no handles, and as such I couldn't really get my arms around it. I could hold it along the narrow length, but then it was standing up way over my head, which wasn't stable in my grip and completely blocked my vision. I was okay levering it up into the trunk, and then taking it out of the trunk at home, but I couldn't carry it without fearing I'd stumble and drop it and break the goddamned thing.
Fortunately, Malaya works out too, and she was able to hold one end while I held up the other, and we slowly worked our way up the stairs and into the condo. Once there I started looking at the compartment on the wall where the old A/C had been (hence the plug and the box we've been using for the cat bathroom). We'd never seen the unit; the previous owners took it with them, or perhaps it broke long ago and they threw it out. At any rate, the box had always been empty and covered over with new wood, through which Malaya's dad had cut the hole for the cat door, years ago when she first moved in.
The second problem was the size of the hole. It was impossible to precisely measure with the wooden cover over it, but it looked the hole was going to be just slightly too small. Wide enough by a few inches, but just a fraction too low. Literally, like an eighth of an inch too low. We're talking the thickness of a coin, but we couldn't tell without some destruction.
Before we got going on that, we made a call. Another customer at Lowe's had mentioned seeing portable A/C units a few days before, at Fry's. "Of course!" we thought, "Why didn't we think of Fry's?" They're a huge computer store, but they sell every sort of household-size electronic gadget; not appliances, no microwaves or vacuums or washer/driers, but lots of cool stuff. Every kind of computer item, but also televisions, stereos, wine coolers, mini-fridges, and more. And what self-respecting geek doesn't have a portable A/C unit in his computer room? How else can you keep things cool with 10 computers burning it up during a LAN party?
So when we got home we called Fry's. (Driving straight there was out of the question, since I was 99% sure they'd be sold out, and besides, the route there took us right by our home, and even if they'd had a portable a/c unit, we could not have fit it and the big one from Lowe's in my car at the same time. Not without leaving Malaya behind, at least.)
So we muscled the big one into the house, chugged another water each, and called Fry's. What did the woman say when she answered the phone?
"Thank you for calling Fry's, we're open until 11pm tonight and if you're calling about the air conditioners we're all sold out."
I laughed and said, "Thank you." and hung up.
Then I chugged another water (I'd had 3 gatorades and maybe 8 bottles of water already that day) and got to work on the wall while Malaya headed out to a pet store. After all, we weren't just gaining an air conditioner, we were losing a cat potty, and she wanted one of those boxes shaped like a turtle shell, with a built in top and sides so they wouldn't kick litter all over the house.
About like this one, as it turned out.
Tearing off the wall was quite a chore, and the fact that I was doing it in 99 degree heat didn't help much either. After I got the front off I removed the hinged door on the back patio (which we previously swung open to remove the litter boxes to scoop them) and then spent about 20 minutes just sweeping all the loose litter out. The cats kick, the stuff goes everywhere, and we had maybe 10 pounds of litter in there. I ended up cutting a hole in the top of the plastic container of new cat litter just so I could pour the old in for later use. Yes, reusing pre-kicked cat litter. Gee, I sure hope it's good enough for them to shit on.
Once I had the box cleaned out and the carpet remnants reemovved, Much to my surprise, it turned out that the box was a metal case with a bottom that slid out; clearly something that had been installed for the previous a/c unit, and that had fit it properly. It was much too low for our new one, but we were still hoping it would just fit into the hole, once I removed the metal housing. This was a lot easier said than done, especially with my hammer and other good tools in Malaya's office where they were taken last week for some picture hanging duty, but I eventually managed to power out some big screws and pry loose 8 finger-length nails (such fun with only a screwdriver and pair of pliers), and the box was mine!
At which time I discovered, much to our shared horror, that the hole was in fact, about 1/4 too low. Or possibly not tall enough. And it remained too small, even after we vigorously sanded down the upper edge of sheetrock on the inside, and said a lot of bad words. There was no making it any bigger, either. Whoever cut the hole in the wall did it with tools we do not possess, and then nailed thick wood inside, above and below, to give the heavy A/C unit something to be anchored to. It's basically a window through the wall, at floor level, but without any sill. And it's a fraction of a centimeter too short for our a/c to fit.
We weren't going to give up at that point; not with the temp still near 100 at 6pm, and a miserable night in front of fans ahead of us. So with more grunting and straining I got the a/c unit outside, and we propped up the metal plate from the old a/c box, and levered the front of the new unit through the hole, and blocked off the extra spaces at the sides with some foam and a towel and some duct tape. Yes, it really does fix everything. Except enlarge openings that are slightly too small for the applicance you wish to cram into them.
Our makeshift solution wasn't pretty, but it's almost identical in function to the ideal; the front of the a/c unit is just about six inches further back than we'd planned. We're not going to leave it there; but we need a tool to chew up the wood a bit. Just a little bit removed from the top and bottom should be enough to slide the big, heavy, metal a/c unit into the wall, and once it's in we'll add a strip of wood to the one side that's too wide, paint it white, and that will be that. The question is what are we going to do with the thing come winter. Sudden runaway global warming aside, it's cool-to-cold here from October through May, and we really liked it when the cats had their litter boxes outside. So maybe we'll pull the a/c out of the wall and stick it in a corner somewhere come fall, and reinstall it next summer, if we're unfortunate enough to still be living here then?
I've gotten ahead of my story though, for words can hardly do justice to the blissful joy we experienced when the a/c had been running for a few minutes, and the cold air began to pour forth. It did almost nothing at first; cooling the room about as much as your open fridge does to your kitchen. It had quite a bit of work to do, obviously, with the entire apartment up over 95 degrees, but it chugged along valiantly, and we were suddenly quite happy they'd only had 18,000 BTU models, instead of a much less powerful 10,000 BTU like we'd been planning to buy.
After an hour the living room right in front of the a/c was cooling, but mostly along the floor, and only in front of the unit. It's funny; the plastic vents on the inside can be turned a bit to the sides, like the ones in a car, but they don't turn very far, and the air was mixing about as easily as the
Rios Negro and Solimoes.
Directly in front of the vents, and up to about thigh height, the air was like 75, and very comfortable. Chest height, or a foot to either side of the path of the vents, it was 85. A step further to either side, or around the corner in the kitchen or bathroom or bedroom, the temperature was unchanged, and pushing 100.
So we left. Turned the a/c fan on high, laid out some cool clothing, shared a quick cool shower, threw on our clothing, and all but ran out the door. Our celebratory dinner was a Todai, and though my meal was most memorable for the fact that I drank 5 full glasses of Pepsi, and a fair amount of Root Beer and water too, it was pretty tasty. And by the time we got home the living room was feeling pretty comfortable, though the rest of the condo was still meltingly hot. Especially the bedroom.
We couldn't take the cool to the bed, so we did the next best thing. Dragged the Memory Foam matress cover out into the living room, threw a fresh sheet on top, and sacked out as early as we could stand to. Sleeping in front of the cold fan wasn't that great; either my toes were cold or my core was hot, and the blowing air on my face wasn't pleasant. I went to bed around 1 and got up at 6, after waking up at least every hour all night, but it beat the hell out of sweating away the night in the bedroom. And we would have sweated; thanks to the humidity the temp never got below about 74 outside, and the bedroom was still 87 at about 9am, despite the window being open all night. It's about 83 in there now, with the window closed and the door open and a fan blowing cool air in from the hallway.
I'm not sure if this A/C unit will ever get the bedroom cool, at least not while the outside temps are so grossly above normal, but that's more the fault of our apartment layout than the power of the a/c. I'm sitting here Sunday afternoon at 2, wearing house pants, a t-shirt, and socks, and I'm actually a little cold, this room's gotten so nice. If you stand with your back to the a/c and take 5 steps, then turn left in the hallway and take four steps, then turn left and take 4 more, you'll bump into the bed. And if you didn't, and physical objects didn't slow you down, another left turn and another five steps would put you back just about where you began. As they say, 2 wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do.
There's not much air flow down the hallway and then into the bedroom, not even with fans helping it along (I ran a box fan full speed blowing out the bedroom window last night for hours, to negligible effect.) and with today's forecast just as miserable as yesterday's and tomorrows, I suspect we'll be sleeping on the living room floor again. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Especially not once Malaya returns from her parents' house with our inflatable air mattress.
Tragically, the new a/c wasn't without casualities. Besides yesterday's sore back and today's aching right bicep (strained it lifting something, at some point), and a pair of weird little cuts on my right hand, the constant exhaust of super hot air basically BBQed one of our favorite and (previously) healthiest plants. You see it here this morning, and it was sitting maybe 4 feet behind the a/c unit, where it's been growing and blocking the view up into our bedroom or several years. It's been doing okay with the furnace weather, but the kiln exhausts from the a/c literally cooked most of the leaves.
Still, no glorious battles are won without losses, and if that plant, and the four others I moved from beside our bedroom window before they could join it, are the only prices we pay for this liberation from the tyranny of baking heat, it's a clear victory for our side. (At least until we get next month's electric bill...)
Labels: summer, weather
Friday, July 21, 2006
Everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it...
It's about the time of year that I usually start bitching about the hot weather. I haven't been commenting since 1) I bitched a bunch some weeks ago when it was 100 for three straight days while my parents were visiting, and 2) it's just too hot to bother.
You know how they say after a while prisoners no longer dream about being free? That's what it's like here. I know it used to be comfortably cool during the daylight hours, and that I could often wear socks and a shirt during the day without immediately filling them with involuntary bodily secretions, but it's hard to remember those halcyon days of yore. Also known as early June.
So far 2006 has been the hottest year in human record, both in the US and worldwide, and late July's doing nothing to change that fact. It's been in the low 90s here almost every day this month, and it's going to continue for
the forecastable future. In fact that forecast is pretty much unchanging; it's been 88-93 (31-33c) for the high every day for weeks, and during that entire time they've been predicting 5 more days of the same, before some gradual cooling back towards the mid-70s that we average during this month. This pretty well defines the accuracy of human weather prediction; they can forecast hurricanes and stuff now thanks to satellite photos and radar, but the rest of the time they just say it'll be about what it was today for the next few days, before gradually regressing to the mean. And they'll usually be right.
The sad part is that I find myself checking the weather.com forecast every day when it's hot (and never when it's cold, raining, etc), even though I could write the forecast myself, with 99% accuracy. (That's accuracy compared to the weather.com forecast, not to actual reality, which pretty well does what it wants.)
It's not horrible weather; it cools off at night and it's nice in the morning until about eleven, and we don't have the humidity that's
killing all those old people in the midwest; I just dislike any temperatures over about 80, and find myself, more than ever, wanting to just up and move to Half Moon Bay. Where it's 64 every day of the year.
No, really.
Failing that, we could use an air conditioner to make the days tolerable and the nights sleepable, but it seems so pointless. Our condo is just one bedroom, and the bedroom winds around a hallway to the livin room, so there's little airflow. A/C in the living room wouldn't help the bedroom, or vice versa, and those portable A/C units are so loud Malaya couldn't sleep next to one anyway. Besides, it's usually hot enough to want one about 2-3 weeks all year here... at least that's the case in years that aren't the hottest in recorded human history.
The heat wave's killing my productivity, as it always does. I should just fight through that shit, but try as I do, I am never very successful at writing or editing fiction when I'm sitting in front of a fan with sweat running down my back. And then I'm so relieved when it's finally cool that I tend to screw around for a couple of hours, and I'm tired all the time because I'm not sleeping well in the daytime heat, etc. In summary, not everything is exactly as I want it to be. Waahh, waaahhh, boo-hoo, sob.
Update: 99 here today and the heat has officially cracked us. With at least 4 more days of this forecast, and August and September the hottest months in our part of the world, we decided to get a portable air conditioning unit. Unfortunately, as the past hour of website looking and local store calling has shown me, everyone else had the same idea, and there's not a portable a/c unit to be had in the Bay Area. Plenty of window units, but that's not something that'll work in our apartment. I called Home Depot (they only sell portables online in NoCal), Sears (only window units in stock and poor selection), two nearby OSH hardwares (don't stock portable and sold out of window), Lowes (don't sell portable), and the eight closest Wal-Marts.
I hate Wal-Mart and refuse to enter their hellish cave-like stores, but in this instance I'll bend my usual rule. Unfortunately, 4 of them never had any portables in stock, and the other 4 were all sold out. One did say they might get some more in tonight when the delivery truck arrives, and yes, we're planning on calling them about every hour just in case. It's a sad state of affairs, but we figure $450 split two ways is more than worth it to counter this hellish heat, even if it does tack $50 a month onto our electric bill. We'll never use the thing after September anyway.
Labels: summer, weather
Monday, July 17, 2006
My first plagiarism!
I could make this a very long post, but I'll try to keep it under control. It's an interesting situation though, and I want to do it justice.
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone calling himself, "The Boss." He told me that someone on his site had apparently plagiarized some of my writing, and that he wanted me to look into it. He didn't include a link to the alleged word theft though, or a link to what might have been copied from my site. I wanted to investigate before I replied, so I went to the domain name from whence his email had come, and found... confusion.
Here's the site,
TIWF Wrestling, and go ahead and take a look and see if you've got any idea what it is. There's no about page, and the words at the top of the main page didn't really explain anything to me:
The TIWF is an online efed created to give wrestling fans their chance to live the dream of being a professional wrestler. Haven't you ever wanted to cut a sweet promo in front of an audience? Feel like bashing someone in the skull with a chair or putting them throough a burning table? Well, here is your chance. TIWF is basically like a mix between ECW and WWE. The TIWF will have one weekly show, on Tuesdays, and one monthly pay per view held on the third Friday of every month.
SIGN UP TODAY!!!
Okay, so it's something to do with professional wrestling, but what are they talking about with putting on weekly and monthly shows? I thought maybe it was some kind of online video game thing, like they organized matches over Xboxes or maybe they had some kind of Sims wrestling game and people orchestrated their own fights and uploaded the videos.
I was wrong, and once again, thank god for Wikipedia. From
their "ewrestling" entry:
E-Wrestling is an internet variation on creative roleplay, based on the world of professional wrestling.
E-Federation Categories
Most federations are categorized into one of three groups, based on which of the three content elements — the roleplay, the angle, or the written match itself — decides the outcomes of a federation's matches, championships, and shows. In all federation types, all three elements are presumed to exist, and even hybrid federations that claim to strike a balance tend to favor one element over the other.
Regardless of the federation's type, all federations are composed of players (also called handlers) who portray their own character(s) within the federation, and may write roleplays for their performances as needed. Some federations desire characters based on mainstream wrestling personalities (or "real" wrestlers) in order to lend authenticity to the federation, while others may prohibit these in favor of original characters, in hopes of cultivating a distinct identity. Additionally, use of created wrestlers avoids potential litigation over copyright infringment. The distinction does not affect the actual gameplay of the federation aside from the fact that real wrestlers start with an established character while created wrestlers have no such ready-made background.
So it's text-based roleplaying, in which players not only invent their own wrestling characters, but engage in actual matches, which presumably play out like those "everyone writes a paragraph" stories you probably did in school. One guy starts off the story, another one answers his opening and takes it in a new direction, the first gets to rebut, and so on, with the readers or site admins deciding who "wins" based on who tells their story better. If it wasn't about something as irredeemably-idiotic as pro wrestling, I might actually find the concept pretty cool.
Seriously though, and I'm not saying this to start a flame war or because one of their "wrestlers" plagiarized me, but don't the concepts of text-based RPGing and pro-wrestling seem mutually contradictive? Like anyone who would be smart and witty enough to excel at the task would be repelled by the genre?
Anyway, The Boss mailed me back promptly, and included a link to the offending entry. I was curious to see what the guy had stolen, since after all, it's not like I'm writing wrestling-based stories, or even blog entries. Not surprisingly, I'd underestimated the creativity and imagination of the plagiarizing competitor, and I was amazed to find that he'd taken several chunks from the early version of the first chapter of my just-completed novel. Yeah, the fantasy story that was originally based on Diablo II. How could that fit into a wrestling RPG thing?
Check it out.
I couldn't bring myself to read the whole thing, but he seems to be doing a Gravedigger sort of thing, where he's used my descriptions of the graveyard and cathedral as the atmospheric set for his wrestler, "Nailz." So Nailz has this cool scenery and setting, and once the cameraman approaches he does the usual pro wrestler rant about how tough and deadly he is, and how wimpy his opponent is and how easily he'll crush her bones to bake his bread. Or something along those lines; I certainly didn't read the whole monologue.
If you don't remember my original story, it's
here on this site, and was
originally posted on diabloii.net way back on
Halloween, 2002.
It might be interesting to compare the versions of my story to the one he's copied, since I rewrote it somewhat between posting it on the D2 site and posting I here, and there are probably a few words different in the portions Nailz has copied. Not that it really matters which site he took it from. (Incidentally, it's been totally rewritten and improved upon in the final novel, which I hope goes without saying.)
If it were a subtle theft I'd quote passages side by side, but there's no point with this one. The guy took multiple consecutive paragraphs and changed maybe one word in 25, so it's not like we need the FBI lab evaluate the findings.
I guess I should be angry, but I'm pretty indifferent to the whole thing, really. If a real writer stole one of my stories and tried to get it published, I'd be outraged. Some guy taking a few paragraphs and clumsily appending his own dialogue on a e-wrestling site though, is just amusing. It's pretty much the definition of non-profit use, and while it's obviously unethical, that's more an issue for his ewrestling opponent and the commissioner of the e-fed to take action on.
Speaking of, it's my fault that nothing's been done yet, since after The Boss' second mail, I took a week to get around to following up and actually comparing the writing (I couldn't bring myself to do it... come on, it's a pro wrestling RPG!) and replying to him. When they confronted him, the Nailz guy apparently said he'd sold part of his story to me, and while that's a pretty pathetic excuse, (Sold it to me 4 years ago and just got around to using it now? And I did what, bought 6 paragraphs and then wrote 5000 more to go around them?) when I didn't quickly contradict it what were they supposed to do?
Anyway, I found the whole thing pretty interesting, as well as informative. I doubt I would have ever heard of e-feds without this episode, and while I can't imagine ever doing anything with this information, I like learning new things. It's also nice to have my first clear and official bit of fictional plagiarism. It's probably happened before, and it's certainly happened with my gaming site writing (Hell, people used to copy and sell my D2 strategy guides on ebay.) but this is the first confirmed, no-doubt, blatant theft of one of my works of fiction. And yeah, I could have asked for a bit more prestigious thief, but hey, you've got to get your cherry popped at some point, and how many of us lost it to someone we're proud to have spread our legs for?
Labels: plagiarism, writing
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Worth a 1000 words...
Just a plug for my new favorite blog,
Factum. It's a very simple site concept; they just post interesting pictures of this and that, found all over the Internet. The enjoyment I get from scrolling down the almost word-free pages is interesting, especially compared to the millions of letters I require on this site to say anything at all.
It's not a very good site to hit daily, but give them a week and there are always a few new photos. The real joy comes from the monthly archives, since they go back to 2004 and there are a good 40-50 pictures per page, at least a quarter of which never fail to amuse or at least interest me.
Labels: links
Saturday, July 15, 2006
"Lazy-eyed Rasputin..."
This short video caused me to laugh the hardest I've laughed this month. And that's saying something, with the South Park DVDs (Sseasons 1-6 from Malay for my b-day last month!) we've been watching lately. It's a hilariously-subtitled recording of a phone call from someone in Microsoft Tech Support, with appropriate visuals added. The caller has a heavy Indian (?) accent, but moreover, his English is creatively brilliant, in a "What the hell did he just say and what did he think it meant?" sort of way.
Just watch it; it's like 30 seconds long, and the meaning of title of this post will become clear as events unfold.
Labels: humor
Fake Nude Celebs!!!
Sounds like an email your spam filter would devour, doesn't it? Anyway, if you enjoy fake nude celeb shots,
check these out. They look pretty good, though I only glanced at a few.
I bring it up not just to share NSFW eye candy, but since I had a contrarian question. You always hear from actresses (and occasionally actors) who are upset that their faces were pasted onto some random nude photo. What about the other victim in the virtual crime? What about the body model?
Say you're not a celebrity, but you watch your diet, work out everyday, and you're justly proud of your quality physique. You have taken some nude photos, gotten compliments on them; probably you're even making some money with semi-amateur modeling. And then one day there you are, nude, ripped, glistening... with Courtney Love's blotchy face pasted between your ears! Wouldn't you be kind of pissed? Some pudgy no-talent who has never appeared in public wearing less than a pound of makeup or in a magazine feature without extensive air brushing, and they're essentially stealing your body, without compensation or credit being given! Sure, more people will see your abs wearing Britney Spear's face than would otherwise, but if no one knows it's you, what good does that do you?
Yet it's the celebrities who complain about it, as if they're not
being hugely flattered by having their faces stuck on an almost-certainly superior body?
Labels: celebrity nudes
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Bad Writing Winner
I post about this contest whenever I see it mentioned, and since this year's winner actually made me laugh out loud... here it is:
SAN FRANCISCO - A retired mechanical designer with a penchant for poor prose took a tired detective novel scene and made it even worse, earning him top honors in San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing.
Jim Guigli of Carmichael submitted 64 entries into the contest. The judges were most impressed, or revolted perhaps, by his passage about a comely woman who walks into a detective's office.
"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean," Guigli wrote.
...The contest is named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" began with the oft-mocked, "It was a dark and stormy night."
Is that so bad it's good, or just so bad? You've got to appreciate the originality of his concept, at least. "Dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean" is almost brilliant, in an incredibly over-the-top sort of way.
Labels: writing
YouTube Misadventures
I
slipped in a link to a huge listing of
80s music videos a few weeks ago, the vast majority of which were hosted by You Tube. I haven't talked about it (or much of anything else) since, but I've been really enjoying YouTube and their user-uploaded archive of music videos from the 80s, and 90s, and more.
At first I just used that 1500 videos list, but lots of the links were broken, or the one song they had per artist wasn't the one I wanted them to have, I began searching up others. And I found them. Oh did I find them.
Warning! Once you start searching for stuff on You Tube, your evening is just about over. I haven't found everything I've gone looking for, but I have found the vast majority, in one form or another, and the time sink-ability of that site is astonishing. Hours vanish in a blink, and for someone who's deadly committed to finishing the vast and ever-expanding editing job on my novel before September, lost hours are kind of a bad thing.
In addition to hosting a video of some sort for virtually every hit song over the past 30 years, You Tube has tons and tons of related goodies. Live versions of songs, random user-created versions of songs with the music over them, appearances by the stars on talk shows or E! biographies, and on and on. One of the most common and oddest things are anime compilations set to music videos. They call them AMVs, and the concept sounds bizarre, but there are literally tens of thousands of them on YouTube, and you can actually use them to judge the popularity of an artist with today's teen audience. If a band is big with the computer-savvy kids of today, (or at least has some
appropriately-angry music) they'll have dozens of songs set to scenes from
DragonBallZ, or
Full Metal Alchemist, or
Slayers or other anime series most of us have never heard of. If that's not a demographic their fans skew towards, then not so much. Unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of AMVs to Rolling Stones or Led Zepplin songs.
These homemade movies are damn handy, too. None of the anime ones I've watched are any good, in terms of matching up nicely with the music or adding anything to the song. They generally have pretty good sound quality though; certainly better than any of the concert videos, and who knows, you might enjoy watching some of the anime scenes. Anime's good for splicing into four-minute chunks too, since the TV series especially have a tremendous amount of dead time, filled by still shots of backgrounds, characters talking without anything approaching exact lip synch, etc. It's economics; they've got about a $25,000 budget for a 22 minute cartoon while Disney cartoons (back when they still drew them) cost $50,000,000 for 90 minutes. (And
reused lots of stuff too.)
In short, anime TV shows can't afford the time or expense to fully animate every scene, so they've got to cut corners with style and only draw every frame of a few dramatic moments in each show. And those tend to be what people cut out and stick into the AMVs, which means you're essentially seeing the best action moments from an entire DVD of shows in one four-minute,
set-to-Disturbed, block. For better or for worse.
YouTube's also great to catch the greatest hits of popular artists you're only slightly familiar with. I only ever heard Limp Bizket and Kid
Country Rock and Eminem and various other early 00s popular artists on the radio or very occasionally on Mtv, but not so much either of those, since I haven't much bothered with the radio in at least 4 years, and I gave up on Mtv back in the mid 90s, when they decided to focus on the 14 y/o girl market and quit playing rock (which was several years before they quit playing music entirely).
Now though, thanks to their enduring popularity (sort of) and YouTube, I can see all of their videos with a few mouse clicks. Yesterday, after perusing and (for the most part) enjoying Kid Rock's and Limp Bizket's faux-rap hits (I'll get to Korn and Slipknot and ICP and all the others eventually.), I was all set to write an entry on the sociological implications of their short-lived popularity (as rap/metal acts, at least). Today I can't see the point, but it is remarkable how essentially identical all of their popular songs were.
Basically every one of their songs are pretty much the same, with a catchy chorus, several verses without rhyming words you don't need to spend any time thinking about, and two or three short bursts of infectiously-head-banging riffs, which often serve as the chorus(es). Also, and this is key to their popularity, they always have some slow, melodic sections, which always build slowly to an explosion of stomping/head banging energy. Limp Bizkit follows this exact strategy in
Break Stuff,
Take a Look Around,
My Generation,
Rollin',
Nookie, and quite a few other songs I can't be bothered to mention at this point.
The key, and their great advance over their thrashing death metal predecessors, are the slow parts, and especially the build up. Every Limp Bizkit song has a shouting/thrashing segment about 3/4 of the way through, and it's always announced and led into by a slow section, which Fred Durst always ends by chanting the same word or two over and over again, while the music cranks up to the inevitable explosion. Check the links if you doubt; it happens in every single song, as predictably as clock work. And the crowd loves it; as documented in all of their concert videos on YouTube the entire pit is leaping up and down in the thrash parts, looking like a hungry human tide.
You see that sort of pit savagery in death metal/thrash concerts, but since those forms of music tend to be unrelenting, the fans can't keep up with it. You've got to be truly psycho to stay up for an entire 4-6 minute thrash song, much less a whole concert of them. It becomes exhausting and limits their audience; hardly any women like that type of largely-humorless music, and even amongst their fans, few can headbang for that long. Limp Bizkit though (and other rap/metal bands, and all of the Nu Metal bands that were big 5 years ago and are gone now) have those thrash moments, but they keep them short and space them out.
I don't have any idea what hard rock bands are popular today, but it seems to me there will always be a need for this sort of music. Teenaged males, the white, over privileged ones especially, always have bottled up rage and frustration (justifiably or not), and always want/need music they can vent to/with. The lyrics and image hardly matter; guys (and some girls) just want to rock out at times, and whatever the new thing is that lets them do that will be popular. It's a trap for the bands though, since you can satisfy that need for a while, but once your fans get older and sick of the same sound, you're unlikely to resonate with 5 or 10 year younger fans, who've grown up listening to a different style of music. Which is why these bands always release 2 or 3 records that go multi-platinum, and then suddenly vanish, or completely change their sound (which, while bold, usually has the same result).
Oh wait, I said I didn't have the sociological analysis in me today, didn't I?
There are plenty of other genres and artists on YouTube as well, of course. I had some humor tonight while trying to remember songs to look up. Some advice, as suggested by Malaya. Make a list of the bands/songs you want to listen to the instant they come into your head. I'm constantly thinking of some old song/artist while watching another video, and by the time that song ends I've forgotten it. Worse are the songs you can't quite remember, and therefore can't look up.
I spent 15 minutes last night trying to remember who did that song with the really croaky vocals, and lyrics that went something like:
there was this kid who, blah blah blah
and there was this girl who, something something somethingI knew it was about tragedies and some guy's hair turning white, but I could not remember who did it, or enough of the exact lyrics to look them up via Google. I even sung some of it for Malaya, and she said it sounded familiar, but couldn't recall either. Finally, to my semi-dismay, I remembered an accurate stretch of the lyrics, and immediately got search hits for Crash Test Dummies and their much-loathed
MMM MMM MMM MMM song. A title I announced to Malaya, to an instantaneous reaction that went something like, "Oh my god I hate that song! No wonder I blocked it out of my memory!"
I had to listen to it, after all that, and yeah, it was pretty much what I remembered.
The video, which I'd never seen an instant of, did nothing to add to the seemingly-somber song though, with cheesy scenes of an olde timey school play and way too many pointless shots of the parents reacting in the audience.
The funn(ier)y part was that I remembered lyrics about some guy who was alone and sad and mopey and wanting to "crash here tonight" before they "drove around this town." Happily, that confusion was soon rectified when I found that song was
Hey Jealousy, by the Gin Blossoms, which doesn't really sound anything like MMM^4. Further Googling informed me that the songs both came out in 1993, when they were on the radio twice every hour, and thus forever joined in my vague memories of them.
You get weird stuff too, especially with one hit wonders. I've long enjoyed the Toadies song,
Possum Kingdom, but never got the CD since that was literally the only decent song they ever did. And it's more than decent; I'd put it in my top 10 faves from the 90s brand of limply-alternative rock. Yet when
I searched for it on YouTube, I found only random junk, a few live recordings of it with predictably-awful sound quality, and
this full length, good sounding, near-professional quality home made feature... with scenes from
Interview with a Vampire set to the song. Five minutes and two seconds of them.
As someone famous once said, "WTF?"
Actually, it sort of makes sense. The song's clever lyrics are about seduction by a vampire, and while scenes of Tom Cruise in lace and a horrible wig aren't exactly what I would have set to this song, that's what multiple Windows and the minimize feature is for.
Or
take these scenes from
Firefly, inexplicably and inexpertely set to an Audioslave song. Is there any explanation, other than some guy liked the song and had the series on DVD and was bored one night?
I'll save a discussion of amusing and horrifying 80s clips for another post, but I have to mention one now. I was looking at Marilyn Manson songs, saw his recent cover of Depeche Mode's
Personal Jesus, and remembered
not liking it very much when it debuted a couple of years ago. I watched again of course, and had about the same reaction. Good song, but his cover is way too similar to the original. Manson masterpieced
Sweet Dreams and
Tainted Love by creeping them up a great deal and distorting the original, relatively wholesome essence with his style of goth metal. Not so with
Personal Jesus, and thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can
easily watch them back to back and see for yourself.
Of the videos, I have to strongly recommend the Depeche Mode one, since as I said in my post about this two years ago, it's laugh out loud funny. Unintentionally, I assume, but it's got to be the campiest gay theater I've seen this side of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The four ambiguously sexual Depeche Mode guys are in some sort of Old West/Mexican town with a whorehouse, and while the girls are pretty (though not at all Mexican) there's zero heterosexual eroticism about the video. The Depeche Mode guys are all in these black leather cowboy outfits, with leather chaps and fierce cowboy hats. They mince around town, leading horses (but not riding, of course) and wearing sunglasses, with leather vests open to display their hairless chests, they crack whips, they pout, they look yearningly, and so on. You've never seen a gayer cowboy on screen, and that includes
Brokeback Mountain and the one in the Village People.
They eventually end up in rooms with the whores, but the fact that we never see any interest in the women from the men, and no exposed skin, and not even any simulated kissing, sends a pretty clear message. I do not know if any of the guys in Depeche Mode are actually gay or not, (no one else seems to either, though it's
a popular online topic). I don't really care either (I disliked them because of their wimpy music back when they were popular, and have mellowed enough to enjoy their music while not caring enough to own any of it now.) but in any event, I consider their
Personal Jesus video a masterpiece of gay camp, and just watched it three straight (ba-dum!) times while stifling laughter. The panting-in-silhouette segment is probably my favorite, though the lead singer doing that limp wrested whip cracking while posing in his leather chaps, motorcycle cop glasses, and chest-baring leather vest is definitely a close second.
If not for this classic,
hysterically-misguided Billy Squier video (with the roll-on-the-floor dance moves, belly-shirts, and legendary ripped pink tank top straight from Richard Simmons' closeted closet), I'd say DM's PJ was the gayest, non-gay video ever.
Feel free to make YouTube suggestions in the comments; songs or artists, since it's fun to catch up on classic disasters, as well as all I've missed while avoiding the radio for the last decade.
Labels: music, you tube
Saturday, July 08, 2006
New Dictionary Entries
Amusing
article on Yahoo about the 2006 edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, with a few of the newly-added words.
New words and phrases from the fields of science, technology, pop culture and industry are chosen each year by Merriam-Webster's team of editors after months of poring over books, magazines and even food labels.
"They are not tracking verbal language. They are looking for evidence that words have become assimilated into the written English language," said Arthur Bicknell, senior publicist with Merriam-Webster.
The mouse potato (who spends as much time on the computer as his/her 1990s counterpart did on the couch), the himbo (attractive, vacuous -- and male) and the excessively emotional drama queen were among 100 new words added to the 2006 update of America's best-selling dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
Other words making their debut this year were soul patch (a small growth of beard under a man's lower lip), unibrow (two eyebrows joining together) and supersize -- the fast food industry phrase for extra large meals. The technology world contributed ringtones (changeable incoming cellphone call signals) and spyware (software installed in a computer to surreptiously track a user's activities) while biodiesel and avian influenza came from the world of science.
Yes, I had to post this just because they said "himbo." Malaya insisted. I also enjoyed the fact that an article on dictionary entries misspelled "surreptitiously" so badly that my Word spell checker wasn't even able to offer the correct spelling as a suggestion. It did offer one word as a replacement, though. "Scrumptiously!"
Labels: language
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Pennies Going Away?
In news I greet with lustful approval, there's another drive underway to phase pennies
out of the US money supply.
A penny bought a loaf of bread in early America, but it's a loafer of a coin in an age of inflation and affluence, slowly sliding into monetary obsolescence.
For the first time, the U.S. Mint has said pennies are costing more than 1 cent to make this year, thanks to higher metal prices. "The penny is going to disappear soon unless something changes in the economics of commodities," says Robert Hoge, an expert on North American coins at The American Numismatic Society.
That very idea of spending 1.2 cents to put 1 cent into play strikes many people as "faintly ridiculous," says Jeff Gore, of Elkton, Md., founder of a little group called Citizens for Retiring the Penny.
The article doesn't mention the millions more that would be saved in labor costs and transportation fees, if we didn't have tons of pennies floating around out there, and the countless hours we'd all save no longer being stuck in grocery lines behind little old ladies with big purses and bills of $7.04.
There are people who want to keep pennies around, of course, but happily, their campaign is off to a rough start, thanks to their choice of universally-hated himbo Kevin Federline as a spokesman.
No, really.
I gave my opinion on this a year ago (
April 4, 2005. Scroll/find down to "I despise pennies") and rather than rewording it, I'll just quote myself.
I despise pennies and would be overjoyed if they were phased out of the US monetary system. Stop making new ones, never give old ones out in change and melt them all down into playground equipment. (Even though playground equipment these days is made entirely from plastic.) Items could still cost any amount of money, you'd just round up or down to the nearest $.05 at the cash register, and no more would those annoying copper disks clog up coin trays and cash registers.
...The only argument I've ever seen against removing pennies, other than ones from tradition or sentimentality, is that consumers would get gouged on prices as stores increased everything a few cents... it's not true. Stores would actually lower prices, since they like the psychological illusion of prices being lower than a dollar. Things would cost $.95 instead of $.99, and anyway, stores could still set prices to penny values; the total would just be rounded up or down at the register. Besides, with multiple items purchased at once and sales tax on top of that, you never pay 99 cents for something that cost 99 cents anyway.
We'd just need the penny-deletion law to mandate that cash register prices had to round up or down fairly. That way we'd break even on purchases over time, with some costing you 1 or 2 cents more, and others costing 1 or 2 cents less. Bills of 98, 99, 100, 101, and 102 cents would all be an even dollar, and 7 could round up and 3 down, or vice versa, to keep it even over all.
So anyway, we're all agreed. Now let's just hope that metal prices stay high, and that the US congress can make a wise decision based on reason and logic, rather than sentimental pandering to the American public.
In other words, it'll never happen.
Labels: money
World Cup Madness
The subject's been beaten to death by now, but it's still true... Americans just do not
care about soccer.
Despite a doubling of television ratings for the first-round matches this month, before the U.S. squad failed miserably, soccer still ranks below televised poker tournaments in a land where baseball, basketball and American football rule.
ABC-TV's average rating of 2.5 for the first eight matches it aired represents barely 8 million viewers in a nation of just under 300 million. Only 3.9 million Americans watched the 2002 World Cup final, which had an audience of 1.1 billion worldwide.
By comparison, nearly 91 million viewers watched this year's Super Bowl, the glitzy climax to the season for North America's home-grown form of football. Nearly 39 million watched the Academy Awards, Hollywood's big night, in March and 36 million tuned in for May's finale of "American Idol," a television talent show.
On ABC's sports cable network, ESPN, which presumably attracts more serious sports fans, the World Cup has had few viewers, averaging around 1.75 million on channels that reach 91 million homes.
No surprise, then, that a poll by the Global Market Insite (GMI) market research service found that only 11 percent of Americans surveyed were "definitely" interested in the World Cup, compared with 45 percent of respondents world-wide.
The thing that always puzzles me about the ratings is the fact that the US has huge immigrant populations, and I'd assume many of the recent arrivals from Mexico and Europe and Africa are big soccer fans. So why aren't they watching? I guess the Hispanic people are probably watching it on Univision, for the good Spanish language announcers, but what about everyone else?
At any rate, no, no one in the US really cares about the World Cup. Soccer (as we call it over here) is a sport that kids play in leagues, but that is largely abandoned by high school, when the more talented athletes switch over to playing baseball or basketball or football full time, since those are the sports adults in the US follow, and the ones that you can get a college scholarship with and dream about a lucrative pro career in. I'm sure there are American soccer players making good money playing the sport, but if so they're overseas and well out of the national media spotlight.
I was talking about sports popularity with a friend in Scotland last week, and trying to figure why soccer has never caught on at an adult, professional level here. Americans are band wagoners when it comes to sports, and we'll get interested if American athletes are winning; hence the Summer Olympics are huge and the Winter are much less so. A few years ago when the US women won the Women's World Cup in the US, it was huge news and got big ratings, and if the US Men ever managed to get out of the first round their games would get good ratings too. Unfortunately for this year, the US Men laid an egg (as basically every casual sports fan in the US expected them to), and with most of the games from Germany on around 7am US time, that's certainly not helping the ratings either.
On a more basic level, I think the problem with soccer for US fans is the lack of individual matchups. Soccer is too much of a team sport, where everyone has to work together to create one of the all-too-infrequent scoring opportunities. There are breakaways and moments of excitement, but soccer is too much a pack of little guys roaming around in free space. Besides the lack of scoring in soccer, Americans seem to prefer one on one matchups at crucial moments in the game. We want the quarterback throwing to the wide receiver, or the running back dancing through the defense, or Kobe cutting through the paint for a dunk, or the batter vs. the pitcher with the game on the line. The essential fluidness and sharing and organic nature of soccer makes it very different than the most popular US sports, and defies our current obsession with celebrity and individuality. You might go a half or an entire game without seeing your favorite soccer player do anything other than pass the ball to his teammates, and that's just not the way to sell tickets in the US.
On a personal level, I'm as guilty as everyone else. I've not seen any of the World Cup, aside from some highlights during my infrequent ESPN viewing, and I'm not really following it, other than glancing at the scores when they're on the main page of espn.com and other major sports sites. I might watch the final game, or at least some of it, but since I have no idea when it's on and suspect it'll be shown at around 6am my time, you guys probably shouldn't plan on hitting up this blog the evening after the game in expectation of my big World Cup write up.
Labels: soccer
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